Russia Discovers Its Shtetl

© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. APTER ON CH E RUSSIA DISCOVERS ITS SHTETL n 1823, Andrei Glagolev defended his dissertation in literature and decided to take a trip through Europe, which would result in his fa- Imous Notes of a Russian Traveler and would bring him fame as a per- spicacious ethnographer and geographer. Glagolev did not expect to see much once he left Kiev, yet his discovery of the shtetls in Ukraine fasci- nated him. He visited Berdichev with its “eternal Jewish marketplace.” He found Korets with its beautiful palace and Christian Orthodox convent to be as nice as the Russian districts’ central towns. He liked the fortress and the valley around Ostrog and observed that the house in Ostrog that held the first Slavic printing press now belonged to a Jew. In Dubno, he found an impressive Catholic temple, a military depot, the castle of the Polish magnates, and an excellent hotel with top- notch cuisine.1 Whatever town he visited, he never failed to mention its Polish owners— the Potockis or the Lubomirskis— and to notice whether Russia had or had not already purchased the town from the magnates for its own 29 © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. treasury. Of course, he complained of the importunate Jews who besieged him in Radzivilov, but his encounter with them did not mar his impressions of the towns situated on the Russian lands belonging to Polish no- bility where Jews served as translators, commercial intermediaries, and tour guides. His impressions, appended with a lengthy ethnographic chapter about the Jews, transcended the travelogue genre. His was one of many early discoveries of the shtetl, quite different from the experiences of later Rus- sian travelers, who were supercilious and xenophobic and who called the shtetl muddy and moldy. NEW IMPERIAL BORDERLANDS The golden age of the shtetl coincided with the period of Russia’s enlightened despotism and geographic expansion. It was precisely this epoch, from Catherine II through Alexander I, that came to be known as Russia’s golden age. Russian monarchs found themselves in new political and geographic circumstances. Between 1772 and 1795 Russia, in close cooperation with Austria and Prussia, partitioned Poland and swallowed up 66 percent of its territory— about 400,000 square miles, the entire eastern part of the country with its cities, towns, townlets, villages, valleys, roads, lakes, rivers, forests, and 900,000 to 1,200,000 Jews. Yet in the early 1790s, self-indulg ent Russian statesmen showed little if any interest in exploring their new domain— a strange reaction in light of the nascent Polish military resistance, the 1794 Kosciuszko rebellion, and the 1795 third partition of Poland. The newly established administrators sent Catherine II dozens of “Potemkin” reports, which unsurprisingly ignored the reality on the ground and sur- prisingly neglected the Jews, never before allowed into Russia. The newly appointed rulers felt they were living in a bucolic utopia. Your Majesty, reported the administrators, in Your territories nothing extraordinary has happened: no fires, epidemics, sicknesses, or accidents. “Everything is calm and peaceful,” assured the Volhynia governor. “Ev- erything is alright here,” penned a state clerk from Podolia. Oh, yes, ac- knowledged a Kiev official, there was a fire in Kiev’s Laura monastery, a flood near the Dnieper River, and an earthquake in the Kiev region, but 30 The Golden Age Shtetl © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. this was all local and had no negative impact elsewhere. True, locusts did harm crops here and there but this was really of minor concern. In passing, a senior clerk mentioned that Count Potocki had purchased weapons— 2,000 rifles, 2,000 istols,p 4,000 swords— and the Russian governor allowed him to bring this cargo to his shtetl: after all, Potocki was a magnate, and who could prevent a magnate from purchasing some hunt- ing weapons for personal use? Overall, the Eastern Orthodox peasants were happy, and the Catholic gentry— the Poles— were not, but the opti- mistic Russian bureaucrats thought they could tame the Polish landlords: they’d make them take an oath of allegiance to the Russian Empire, and their further compliance would be a matter of time.2 More prescient than all her governors put together, Catherine knew that things were not that simple. She presented herself as a female savior who had come to redeem Poland from the vicious political threat ema- nating from revolutionary France. Not from the Poles in general and not from the Sejm— the Polish parliament—in particular but from the “evil- thinking party” of the “encroaching French Jacobins,” who had “exhausted her patience” and triggered the partitions of the Polish- Lithuanian Com- monwealth. She, Catherine the Great, had come forth to suppress a “hid- eous rivalry” among Poles and eradicate those “furious and corrupt French rebels who were destroying Poland.” Thanks to Catherine II, Polish patriots would thus appear in Russian discourse as alien French- inspired revolutionary mutineers, enemies of the supposedly submissive Poland, rather than fighters for Polish indepen- dence. Only half a century later did Catherine’s suspicions concerning some disloyal Poles become transformed into full-fledge d governmental mistrust of the Russian Poles at large. By the late nineteenth century the regime had transferred this mistrust to the Jews, dismissing their growing loyalty to the Russian crown, and eventually to other borderland ethnici- ties, including Eastern Orthodox Ukrainians. Yet before Russia’s rampant late nineteenth-cent ury xenophobia came to dominate politics, Catherine addressed her newly acquired peoples— Jews included— with the same empathy a stepmother would show her foster children. She expected awe, not love. From her subjects she sought mercantilist profit, not cultural homogeneity. She ordered a manifesto Chapter One: Russia Discovers Its Shtetl 31 © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. declaring the results of the partitions and the incorporation of the Polish lands into Russia. She wanted the territories rearranged: Kiev, Podolia, and Volhynia provinces established in lieu of the old Bracław woewodstvo, districts introduced, and governors appointed. All Polish crown assets were confiscated for the benefit of the Russian treasury. Combining military candor and political paternalism, Catherine warned her administrators to be “nice” in their treatment of the newly acquired borderland population. “We desire,” she explained, “that these provinces be conquered not only by the power of weapons. Russia will win the hearts of the people in these lands by a kind, righteous, merciful, modest, and humane management.” Now the Jews found themselves in Catherine’s field of vision, though what would be notoriously called the Russian Jewish question was treated by the tsarina as something quite secondary at best. Like many travelers of that time, she considered the Jews in the Polish private towns as a prof- itable asset, not a burdensome liability. With her flowery rhetoric, Cath- erine extended her powerful benevolence to the Jews. She loved the doc- ile and loyal, and abhorred dissenters and rebels. She expected the Jews to be the former, never the latter. “It goes without saying,” she declared, “that Jewish communities, dwelling in the towns and lands attached to the Russian Empire, will maintain all those freedoms which they now legally enjoy, because Her Majesty’s love of humanism makes it impossible to exclude them from the univer- sal future commonwealth under Her blessed rule, while the Jews in turn as loyal subjects will dwell with appropriate humility and engage in trade and industry according to their skills.”3 With her enlightened paternalism firm in hand, Catherine legalized Jewish residence in some fifteen western provinces of theR ussian Empire, the future Pale of Jewish Settlement, or simply the Pale— a turning point in the history of the country previously intolerant of the Jews. Catherine allowed Jews to enroll in the established estates by declaring their status as merchants or townsfolk, thus administratively integrating them into the texture of the empire and extending to them the privileges granted to the Christian merchants and townsfolk. Naturally, the shtetl, the dwelling 32 The Golden Age Shtetl © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. place of most Jews and the economic headquarters of the new imperial lands, became a focal point of Catherine’s geopolitics. THE SHTETL OF CONTENTION Catherine was essentially an enlightened despot, quite often more des- potic than enlightened, whose intuition did not always serve her well.4 She committed herself to preserving the privileges of the landlords, the Polish gentry

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